Wednesday, December 3, 2014

So, I slept with my professor. From The Daily Californian. Sent In By, Like, Everyone.

by Boni Mata

When my professor walked in on the first day of class in all his statuesque glory, wearing a half-buttoned Oxford shirt and chalk-covered slacks, I nearly dropped my pants on the spot. “Love at first sight,” I claimed — I’m that type. Flash forward four months:

“Being with you is a gift,” he said as he stroked the hair that fell down my naked back. I lay on my stomach as we both looked out onto the street at the unfortunate passers-by who weren’t lovers like us. “You’re perfect.”

I knew it was in the cards for me when our knees touched during office hours. I asked him about Hegel, he got up to close the door — not all the way, but ajar. “Go on.” He walked me home after our second meeting. By the third, I was dreaming about him. I’d come to class far past Berkeley time, visibly sulking, “Sorry.” He’d send emails, “I appreciate how your mind works.” I’d reply, “I need to see you outside of class.” Never once did I feel sexual pressure on his part; every one of our intimate encounters, I initiated.

12 comments:

I know another person who calls herself a profesexual. She's only attracted to her professors. Of course, she has been dragging out grad school for as long as she could. I have no idea what she's done now that the dissertation is defended.

I see ethical issues with the idea of sleeping with students, as it may compromise the ability to do the job well, and I see aesthetic issues, esp. with undergrads ('cause, Jesus, boring). And I see potential for exploitation, because of the power difference, but then much, if not most sex comes with some power differences. I have no interest in sex with my students (see aesthetic issues, above), but I don't see the problem if other people do, as long as those ethical and moral issues are addressed carefully.

Semesters are only, at their longest, 13 weeks. If you can't keep your pants on for 13 weeks there is something desperately wrong with your deferred gratification circuits. Unless you suspect that your student will no longer be interested in you once you're not in a position of power over them. In which case, you re taking advantage of that power differential and should be ashamed of yourself.

To say nothing of how it affects the rest of the class, and if you think they don't know, you're delusional.

Exactly. I don't have a problem with proffies sleeping with students, even though I find it morally questionable if they always go for the young, naive ones. But adults are entitled to consensual sex. I only have a problem with it if the student is actually taking their class, working for the prof as a TA, or otherwise being supervised or graded. Then objectivity disappears. Wait until the semester is over, then it might still be questionable, but at least it's not a glaring conflict of interest and injustice to the rest of the students in the class.

Feeling that I must answer again some more. No doubt I'm wrong about this but I will anyway. Here is a question the student and the prof probably never asked themselves: would she have been equally interested in him, or interested at all, if she had met him somewhere else, on an equal footing? If he'd been the middle-aged guy breathing beer breath all over her at the local pub and trying to get into her pants, would he have got a look in? Or how about on holiday in Hawaii, with no air of numinous authority, no gaggle of other students to (subtly of course!) flaunt her status of Teacher's Favourite So There in front of? Maybe. But I bet those factors didn't hurt his chances at all.

No, it is clearly a fetish that has something to do with power, the appeal of older men, the special feeling of being "chosen" from a large pool of willing students (because if the professor is a handsome man, there will always be willing students - and for some reason it always seems to be male professor, female student, not vice versa) and the fact that the professor has all the knowledge that the student is so eager to gain (because it seems that students sleep with professors within their major - if the student is passionate about French poetry, the handsome French poetry professor is going to be the natural object of desire). So basically, it's a fetish, that is why there are sexy schoolgirl Halloween costumes and erotic fan fiction about Hogwarts.

Gutsy post - MA - I had the same thought but was too chicken to say it. Of course the creepy power abuse is the biggest concern, but the students aren't necessarily always victims. Plenty of them get off on the idea that they "made" their professor cross a line.

I learned modern physics from a 30 year old who looked like Paul Newman with jet black hair. Even though it was the smallest major at my college, he was really into using a video camera on a big screen to make demonstrations visible to the "back" of the class (which was never more than 2 rows deep). He often wound up squatting up and down a few times, with the back of his snug black slacks at the center of the camera. I refuse to believe it was an accident. Every straight woman in the department wanted him and he flirted with everyone from the chair to librarian to the entire freshman class.

He never fucked a one of us. Not even those of us who were, from time to time, alone with him in the dark room making holograms.

I think that Allan Bloom explain this in terms of students taking lust for knowledge for actual lust. A student may feel so entranced by the topic of the course, of by the way the instructor delivers it, that they may believe that this feeling is physical or romantic attraction towards the professor. Some professors, knowingly or not, go along and make use of this confusion, allowing a romantic relationship to start. I don't think that the rules that allow relationships after a class is finished protect (?) students from this -- the patronage-deference relationship professor-student persists, maybe forever. I, and suppose all of us, have had my number of student getting crushes on me, and I had to figure out how to set boundaries. On the other hand, I know a number of happy, lasting marriages that started that way. So who am I to judge?

There is also a fairly simple and straightforward explanation, which Wombat touches upon. Some professors are really hot and many students want to fuck them. And some will succeed. We could read a lot of Freudian interpretations into such couplings, but another explanation is the good old fashioned biological imperative that makes us seek out attractive sexual partners. Having to listen to someone lecture for three hours a week gives plenty of time to ponder "what if?" Of course some students have authority figure fetishes or just want to bang their professors for bragging rights or whatever. But sometimes it's just because the professors are hot.

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College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.